A Caveat: Avoiding the Avoidance

One caveat in using Core Drive 8: Loss & Avoidance is that the user must know exactly what they should do to prevent the undesirable event from happening. As mentioned in Chapter 10 on Scarcity & Impatience, if a loss-focused message is simply there by itself, but it is not intuitively obvious what the user needs to do, it often backfires - the Core Drive 8 becomes an Anti Core Drive and the user goes into denial mode. The brain irrationally concludes, “Since I don’t know how to deal with it, it’s probably not that big of a problem anyway.” Status Quo Sloth, which we will learn about later in this chapter, then dominates over the motivation towards loss-prevention.

A study done by health researchers Howard Leventhal, Robert Singer, and Susan Jones asked students to read pamphlets that describe the dangers of tetanus infection²¹¹. There were three groups of students in the experiment: the first group received the warning...